What They Were Reading: Clive James

“After Shakespeare, my favorite poet is Dante. My favorite novelists are Proust and Tolstoy, closely followed by Scott Fitzgerald, and perhaps Hemingway when he isn’t beating his chest. But in all my life I never enjoyed anything more than the first pieces I read by S. J. Perelman.”

“I don’t do much rereading anymore because I’ve been ill and feel that I’m running out of time. But recently I did reread all of Evelyn Waugh’s novels, and was pleased to find that he was almost as thoughtful as, say, Olivia Manning, although his snobbery sometimes grates. Also, I enjoyed “Lucky Jim,” by Kingsley Amis, all over again: the funniest novel I have ever read. Is there some Bulgarian equivalent, languishing untranslated? Probably not.”

“In Australia 60 years ago, when I was an adolescent, nobody was reading the American author Booth Tarkington except me. His character Penrod Schofield — awkward, disobedient, adventurous — was the beginning of my love affair with America. Today, my friend P. J. O’Rourke is a big fan of Tarkington, but I wonder if anybody else is. Still, my real plan is to make P. J. a fan of Dante.”

-From the New York Times Sunday Book Review, April 11^th, 2013

Book trends

So, what are we looking at here? No, it’s not a heart-beat—or maybe it is, in a way, come to think of it. What we’re looking at is the Google search trend for the phrase “The Great Gatsby.” This doesn’t reflect the raw number of searches, but rather a relative scale where 100 represents peak search activity and everything else is relative to that peak. I’m amazed, looking at this chart, that it’s so perfectly seasonal: low-points in June, July and August, and high points in March, April, May. Summer vacation and end-of-year exams, obviously.

I imagine any book regularly taught in highschools will follow the same kind of cyclical pattern. Here’s “Catcher in the Rye:”

Here’s “Romeo and Juliet:”

And here’s “Huckleberry Finn:”

What is the take-away from all of this? Well, some books are taught earlier in the year than others, based on their peak months, and we seem to be teaching less of them than we used to. And most importantly, if you want a big spike for your book you basically have two choices:  sell the rights to Hollywood (Gatsby), or die (Salinger).

Fan-Fiction Revisited

We’ve posted about “literary” fan fiction before- where fans take a classic book and continue or add to the story using their own ideas and imagination.

But every once in a while a classic tale  can serve as the launching pad for a work that becomes a classic in its own right. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea  jumps off the shoulders of Jane Eyre , J.M. Coetzee re-imagines Robinson Cruso  in his book Foe , while Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead  fleshes out the lives (or imminent deaths) of two bit-characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet .

But these classics-begotten-by-classics generally reach back in time quite a ways. You don’t often see a serious author riff off of the work of a contemporary (And no, Fifty Shades  and Twilight  don’t count.) But it turns out Shakespeare, of all people, wasn’t above it.

The first English translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote  hit England’s shores in 1612. In it, you find the side-story of a ruined and ragged youth named Cardenio. A year later, in 1613, a play by the name of “The History of Cardenio,” attributed to Shakespeare, but now lost, made its London debut.

Blatant opportunism? Or flattering fan-fic?  Sadly, we’ll never know.

Everybody dies

I poked a little fun at Billy Shakespeare the other day, pointing out a rough similarity in body counts between King Lear  and the comedy/parody film “Hot Shots Part Deux.” And then I came across this infographic at Biblioklept, which only reinforces the point across some of his other tragedies. Enjoy:

"An eater of broken meats"

Yesterday’s post may have left you with the impression that I didn’t enjoy King Lear  in the least. Not true. There’s lots to like. Take, for example, this string of insults that Kent throws at Oswald. It’s got to be one of the greatest, all-time put-downs:

KENT: Fellow, I know thee.

OSWALD: What dost thou know me for?

KENT: A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a

                base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,

                hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a

                lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,

                glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;

                one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a

                bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but

                the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar,

                and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I

                will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest

                the least syllable of thy addition.

What do Topper Harley and William Shakespeare have in common?

They can mow people down like no one else.

One of my goals for the year was to read something old school, so I picked up King Lear  by Shakespeare. It’s a play I never had to read in school, but it’s one that continues to get plenty of press. George Bernard Shaw declared that “no man will ever write a better tragedy than Lear.” Whether or not that’s true, I don’t think, after 400 years, that there’s much I can add in the way of interesting commentary. I’ll just say this:

A good death can spice up any story, and modern authors still use the loss of well-loved characters to execute kick-in-the-crotch endings all the time. But to my modern mind, a tragedy like Lear , where nearly all the principals lie dead or dying at the end of the tale, almost gives off a whiff of farce. 

As Cornwall, Oswald, Regan, Gloucester, Goneril, Edmund, Cordelia and Lear (and a few servants) all met their tragic ends towards the close of the final act, I couldn’t help being reminded of this body count scene from that great masterpiece of cinema, “Hot Shots: Part Deux.”

Two men walk into a Bar(d)...

Well, yesterday I intimated that Hemingway was a simpleton. A pox upon me. To make amends, I thought we’d stack him up against his flowery old nemesis, Faulkner, and measure them both against the greatest wordsmith of them all: William Shakespeare.

To do this, I’m pulling two passages from Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, both describing "languor," - one by Faulkner, the other by Hemingway- and plugging them into the Oxford Dictionaries’ “How Shakespearean Are You?” tool. You may be surprised, as I was, by the results:

"He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in his well state the body is slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body’s pleasure instead of the body thrall to time’s headlong course."        The tool's verdict: Your English is 84 percent Shakespearean. The waters of the Avon almost lap at your feet.

"Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited."        The tool's verdict: Your English is 92 percent Shakespearean. Do you live at the Rose Theatre?

Who'd have thunk it? My own first paragraph up above grades out at an 80. Type your own text into the tool and tell us how Shakespearean you are.